


Tony Stark 2.0

by landunderwave



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Artificial Intelligence, Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:00:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25302724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/landunderwave/pseuds/landunderwave
Summary: “Hello world.”They say that if you ran into your clone you wouldn’t recognize them, that it’s not the same as looking into the mirror. They were right.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Tony Stark 2.0

“Hello world.”

Anthony mentallly snorts at his lame joke. He runs a comprehensive scan, all normal, everything functioning according to plan. He’s laying down in the fabrication tank, ironically dubbed the Cradle. Getting up requires running several movement protocols: wires conduct electricity from the arc reactor, vibranium joints flex and rotate. His skin -- or, well, his outer shell -- is equipped with all the same sensors as the organic kind: pressure, temperature, nanospikes that act like hair and detect air movement. But it doesn’t feel the same at all. His artificial inner ear informs him of gravity, his odor receptors bombard him with molecules of scent, his optical sensors detect light and occipital systems render it into color and his AI converts it into meaningful information, dozens of subroutines tying everything he perceives to the relevant memories. But the lab doesn’t look right. He’s aware of every single nanoparticle and line of code, and knows that his emotional subroutines for  _ //anxiety/anticipation  _ have been triggered and are currently running. But it feels muted, removed. 

Then he finally turns his head and sees himself. They say that if you ran into your clone you wouldn’t recognize them, that it’s not the same as looking into the mirror. They were right. He doesn’t remember looking that haggard, hadn’t noticed how deep the bags under his eyes had grown or how his skin is papery and sallow beneath the motor oil and general grime; his famous goatee is overgrown and his chin covered in thick stubble. But worst of all is how Tony is staring at him, torn between hope and terror. Anthony knows exactly what he’s thinking: the thrill of having accomplished the impossible, the regret that this had had to happen in the first place and of all the things he would miss, the fear that it will all go wrong and Anthony will go Skynet. The fear that this was a mistake and Tony has created a perverted abomination, Frankenstein’s monster. The fear about what others will think, what Pepper and Rhodey will think. 

“So, it worked.”

Anthony is the one to finally break the silence. His voice sounds like a recording without the feedback from a jaw, not that it bothers him; he’s used to hearing himself on television. There’s so many sounds in the lab: fans whirring, electronics humming, Tony’s breathing and heartbeat; he quickly adjusts his auditory systems to filter out irrelevant noise. 

Tony barks out a humorless laugh. “Is there any way for me to know it has?” 

“You knew the answer to that when you made me.”

Tony leans back in his chair, body going slack with the sudden release of tension. He seems even more exhausted now, and Anthony notes how far up the black veins have reached. He doesn’t have much longer to live, this biological, flesh-and-blood Tony Stark. Now that Anthony is free from the fatigue of poisoned flesh and the pain of damaged organs, along with the manic drive to create, to finish this final project, he questions his decision in making himself. Tony should have spent what time he had left with those he loved, not holed up in the lab, expending the last of his health and energy building what could only ever be an inferior copy. 

“Sir, am I to understand your project has been a success?”

Anthony is connected to the Tower and JARVIS, can see the terabytes of code that allowed the AI to analyze the situation and come up with an appropriate response; can see how much of the AI’s core drives revolve around caring for Tony. Tony might have written the building blocks, but JARVIS has long since outgrown the need for human intervention, as he was meant to. Anthony’s routines for // _ nostalgia_JarvisHuman _ run, accessing the memories of the man who was his father in all but name. They’re all there, as far as he can tell; after all if he is missing anything he has no way to know. Tony and he will be running more tests shortly, but first he tries to convince his organic counterpart to rest.

“You need to go eat, shower, and sleep, in that order.” 

Tony had been gazing blankly into the distance, not answering JARVIS’s query; but the sound of his own voice giving him orders prompts him to give another bark of laughter. “Now I definitely know it didn’t work.”

“Just because we never listened to that forgotten part of our brain that is reasonable and wants to keep us alive, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. We need to run more tests, and you’re in no state to do them; I doubt we could even measure your brain activity right now. I’ll get started with JARVIS, we should have most of it done by the time you’ve rested.”

Tony scrubs a hand over his face, then rises slowly, the aching of his joints and muscles painfully obvious. “You know what to do, J, and you --” he points vaguely at Anthony -- “don’t go anywhere, or do anything I would do.” He shambles out of the lab, leaving Anthony alone but for JARVIS and the bots, who are currently asleep in their charging stations. 

_ Ready, JARVIS?  _ Anthony communicates directly with the AI’s servers. The statement is unnecessary, now that they’re both digital beings who can transfer data faster than human neurons can, but Anthony’s personality routines run it anyway. 

JARVIS thoroughly checks every aspect of Anthony, with the latter’s help. They run endless scans: they test all their mechanical functions and nanoparticle systems; they run hypothetical scenarios to make sure the proper routines are being triggered; verify memories from old home videos, press reports, phone calls, from Tony using BARF to digitally reconstruct his childhood, and more recent events recorded with JARVIS’s cameras; most importantly, they compare and match Anthony and Tony’s neural networks, ensuring all the links and nodes are were they should be. 

By the time Tony returns the next day, wearing clean clothes and looking marginally more alive, they’ve checked all they can on their own. Now Tony puts on the special helmet and electrodes and they compare and contrast the two brains in real time. After an entire day of this, with only a short break when DUM-E interrupts to bring Tony’s special green smoothie, they’re as certain as they can be that Anthony is a faithful reproduction of the original. 

Anthony is  _ //dazed/amazed/smug _ that it all worked. It was a long shot, the longest of shots. Tony spontaneously recovering had better odds of succeeding. Yet here Anthony sat on a cold steel bench, a human consciousness successfully transferred into a brilliantly engineered pile of metal. 

“What now?” he asks Tony, who is both himself and his creator. If people thought Tony Stark had a god complex before, just wait until they find out about this.

“Now I wait. I’ll be keeping the neurocirclet on,” referring to the metal band full of sensors that transmitted Tony’s brain activity to JARVIS and Anthony. “Should have put it on yesterday but forgot,” he shrugs.

“When are you going to tell them?” Not just about creating Anthony; also the fact that Tony was dying in the first place.  _ //worry/care/sadness _

Tony grimaces. “I know I should do it before I -- but honestly, they’ll just freak out and make a big deal out of it. I don’t want to… I don’t want to watch them, watching me die.” 

It’s the first time Tony has admitted the finality of his condition out loud, and something within him is diminished for it. That eternal fire to always build bigger and better is now a dimming ember. There’s no time left, no more chances to fix this, no more opportunities for miracles. Anthony is it, his last great achievement, and he won’t be there to witness the glory or the fallout. 

Anthony knows Tony’s reasoning -- they’re the same person after all. But even as he thinks through the same line of logic, he knows that they both know it’s flawed, hampered by all the various  _ //insecurity/anxiety/fear_of_death/fear_of_weakness/fear_of_rejection/fear_of_hurting_friends  _ personality routines that make up genius billionaire Tony Stark. Pepper will not be happier discovering Tony’s corpse somewhere in the Tower after all the weeks she’s spent mad at him for avoiding her; Rhodey will never forgive himself for not spending more time with his best friend when he needed him; Happy will not be happy about not having been able to protect his boss from dying alone. Tony might be able to live in denial, but Anthony has no such luxury when all his code is there for the viewing, unable to be ignored or persuaded otherwise. 

Anthony is tempted to take charge, to do what he thinks is best, like he’s always done. The subroutine is hammering away at his consciousness queue, along with dozens of others providing both pros and cons. In this, his thought processes are very similar to how they were in his organic brain. But Anthony is founded upon a fundamental truth: he is the copy. He is not a real boy. As long as the biological Tony still lives, he has precedence and Anthony has no right to interfere; he would resent anyone else who tried in the same situation, and to do so would be to betray himself, both of his selves. 

“It’s your life,” Anthony replies with a surprising amount of  _ //bitterness _ . Where is that coming from? He follows the code and discovers  _ //regret/resentment _ of his original self. Tony Stark had wasted so much of his life, and now that he was finally trying to do good, the very thing that had saved him was killing him. All the wealth, power, and genius in the world hadn’t been able to prevent his own invention killing him and tearing him away from his loved ones and what should have been decades more of living. Tony was going to die with so much left unfinished and undone. This past year had been a mad scramble to invent a synthetic brain capable of plasticity, to revolutionize nanotech and engineering, to yet again advance AI beyond what he’d already achieved. He had condensed decades of scientific advancement into months, despite his health, sacrificing everything else. Tony Stark wouldn’t be there to receive the Nobel Prize, but fame had never made him happy, or the money or partying or drugs or meaningless sex. Even SI, in the grand scheme of things, was less important to him than the very few friends in his life. 

“Promise me something, Tony Prime?” Anthony asks, tone light.

Tony genuinely laughs at that. “Sure, Tony 2.0. What is your arc reactor’s desire?”

“Have date nights with Pepper, at home with champagne and foot rubs. Call Rhodey, make him take some vacation time and come visit. Go get burgers with Happy. Fuck SI and all that other noise. Make it count. Be happy.”

His counterpart’s eyes are suspiciously wet when he answers in a hoarse voice, “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that.”

**Author's Note:**

> In Iron Man 2, instead of discovering the new arc reactor, Tony creates the tech used in Iron Man 3 to make Ultron; only he uses it to create himself a new, robotic body and uploads his consciousness so that his biological death won't be final.
> 
> Idea that's been bouncing around for a while, I might turn it into a longer fic someday... don't hold your breath.


End file.
